Grasping Democracy: The Settler-Colonial Turn in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Canada
(forthcoming, Jeffersonian America, University Press of Virginia)
Manifest Destiny was not an American project born in Texas, but a shared British and American project born in the northeast. The border proved to be a cultural crucible over which two settler nations – the U.S. and Canada -- began to work out the rules and methods for taking a continent. The settler-colonial “turn” in North America was thus a borderland event, with its origins in the eighteenth-century and the British Colonial Civil War.
The belief in the right to take, which was the basis for continental expansion, while reflected in political rhetoric and governmental policy, came from the ground up and the settlers themselves. The borderland derived its population and customs from the same Anglo-French cultural cradle, and so it reasons that both nations collaborated in the creation of an American settler nationalism. This book documents how these traditions transformed in settler colonialism, and emerged as complaints, arguments, manifestos, and eventually as political rhetoric and governmental policy.
Whig politicians in New York recognized the effectiveness of American and Canadian settler arguments, and adopted them in their struggles with the Democratic Party in the 1840s. As Whigs articulated a blameless and justified land-taking, they created a settler archetype, a white settler man who would carry democracy by means of taking and improving. Eventually, this archetype became the Republican Party’s everyman, and the culture of justified taking became enshrined in the Homestead and Dominion Land Acts.
Unlike previous studies, this book traces the deep cultural and historical roots of expansion in North America in the actions and words of actual settlers. Furthermore, while it demonstrates the settler-colonial turn in both Canada and the U.S., it also does so in an Indigenous Nation, the Seneca Nation of Indians. It shows how the Seneca recognized the trenchancy of settler arguments for taking and possessing land, and deployed these ideas to defend their sovereignty and codify their ancient communal land practices.